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Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment: The Cultural Politics of Discursive Space

Frank Fischer
The American Review of Public Administration 2006; 36; 19
DOI: 10.1177/0275074005282582
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The American
10.1177/0275074005282582
Fischer / Participatory
Review Governance
of Public Administration
as Deliberative Empowerment
American Review of
Public Administration
Volume 36 Number 1
March 2006 19-40
Participatory Governance as © 2006 Sage Publications

10.1177/0275074005282582
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Deliberative Empowerment hosted at
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The Cultural Politics of Discursive Space

Frank Fischer
Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey
This article argues that there is a need to enrich the theory of citizen participation and the design
of deliberation practices through greater attention to the cultural politics of deliberative space.
The article focuses on the ways the social valorization of political space influences basic discur-
sive processes such as who speaks, how knowledge is constituted, what can be said, and who
decides. From this perspective, decentralized design principles are necessary but insufficient
requirements for deliberative empowerment. The point is illustrated through an analysis of the
Science for the People movement in Kerala, India, a prominent example of deliberative empow-
erment. The discussion shows how the movement employed cultural and pedagogical strategies
to facilitate an empowered participation of local citizens in the deliberative planning process.
These experiences demonstrate the importance of a deeper understanding of cultural meaning
and political identity in the theory of democratic deliberation and the practice of participatory
governance.
Keywords: citizen participation; deliberation; culture; social space; decentralized gover-

nance; local knowledge
T he shift from government to governance represents one of the important theoretical

developments in political science and sociology during the past decade (Pierre, 2000).
Emerging in significant part to deal with the traditional state’s inability to cope with a range
of contemporary social problems, including global problems that reach beyond established
state boundaries, the concept of governance has evolved to identify and explain new modes of
problem solving and decision making that fill gaps created by the failure of traditional forms.
Governance, given its emphasis on decentered citizen engagement, is touted for being a
much more flexible and democratic way to deal with public problems.
The most important actors in this new world of governance have been social movements
and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that have carved out new arenas for these differ-
ent forms of political engagement. Operating in the spaces between formal governmental
structures and the citizenry, these activities emphasize the growing importance of civil soci-
ety as a place for public deliberation and problem solving. Basic to this “subpolitics,” to use
Beck’s (1992) concept, has often been an emphasis on citizen involvement in new and more
radical forms of “cultural politics,” focusing in particular on the politics of social meaning
Initial Submission: April 25, 2005

Accepted: June 30, 2005
19

20 The American Review of Public Administration
and identity. In the process, social movements and NGOs have invented and experimented
with a range of new participatory mechanisms, including efforts to bring together citizens
and experts in new forms of cooperative inquiry. Thanks to these efforts, particularly in envi-
ronmental politics and community development, there are now a considerable number of
experiences and practices in participatory governance.
Many of these activities have offered significant new insights into questions that have long
been ignored in traditional political analysis and in democratic theory in particular. One con-
cerns the degree to which citizens are able to participate meaningfully in the complex deci-
sion processes that define contemporary policy-oriented politics. Another has been the impli-
cations for the nature of professional or expert practices. The discussion that follows draws
out some of the lessons from one of these alternative experiences, the People’s Campaign for
Decentralized Planning in Kerala, India. In an effort to better understand the practices of par-
ticipatory governance more generally, the analysis seeks to elucidate the role of cultural iden-
tity and local knowledge in the design and facilitation of the kinds of political spaces needed
for democratic citizen deliberation.
The Assent of Participation

Situated in the institutional cracks of the traditional state, or what Hajer (2003) terms the
“institutional void,” the practices of participatory governance are reflected in a proliferation
of new forms of social and political association. Indeed, this “association revolution,” as
Salamon (1993) calls it, has involved both the multiplication of existing kinds of participa-
tory arrangements in the 1990s and, even more important, the creation of new spaces con-
structed and shaped by a different brand of social actors. In both the developed and develop-
ing countries, these have involved two important shifts. The most prominent shift has been
from state-centered activities to a proliferation of civil society organizations that deliver ser-
vices and offer various forms of support to economic and social development. These new
organizational spaces have in some cases taken over public activities to such a degree that
some see them as reconfiguring the public sector, supplanting states whose accountability
has long been in question. The other often related shift, less prominent but every bit as inter-
esting, has involved a transition from professionally dominated to more citizen- or client-
based activities, often taking place within the new civic society organizations.
Of particular significance among this new breed of organizations have been NGOs work-
ing to represent and serve the needs of marginalized or excluded groups. In some of these
spaces, excluded peoples—such as the poor, women, AIDS victims, and the disabled—have
created a collective presence that permitted them to speak for themselves. The activists of
many of these groups have even managed to affect the policies of mainstream institutions. In
other instances, a new breed of public servant, the civil society professional, has emerged to
offer assistance. Often schooled in NGOs, such professionals—as government officials or
independent consultants to parallel institutions—have often played an essential role in the
development and spread of participatory approaches to governance.
Fundamental to the activities of many social movements and NGOs has been the creation
of alternative political cultures and the participatory institutions and practices that can sus-
tain them. Movements concerned with the environment, feminism, disability, and develop-
ment, among others, have provided social forums—even laboratories—for experimentation
with new participatory cultures, including new participatory approaches to science and

Fischer / Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment 21
expertise. Such experimentation, emphasizing empowerment and self-help strategies, is

largely designed to counter the bureaucratic and elitist tendencies that define contemporary
political and organizational decision processes. Stressing the development of nonhier-
archical cultures, the theorists of these movements have attempted to address a critical ques-
tion: Is it possible to democratize—or at least make more democratic—the largely hierarchi-
cal, often authoritarian relationships among public administrators and policy experts on one
hand and citizens on the other? Toward this end, the key target of such movement intellectu-
als has been the top-down, superior-subordinate relationship that professionals maintain
with their clients.
Many NGOs speak of “people’s self-development,” emphasizing the role of redistribu-
tion, recognition, and rights in the development of participatory approaches (Rahman, 1993).
Rather than merely speaking for poor or marginalized people’s interests and concerns, they
have sought to develop people’s abilities to negotiate directly with official decision makers.
Beyond institutionalizing new bodies of client or user groups, they have created new
opportunities for dialogue.
As a consequence of these activities, participation gained a place as a central feature of
good governance across the political spectrum in the 1990s. Promoting decentralization,
good governance practices have added an additional layer of local participatory institutions
to an increasingly complex institutional landscape that in some cases has given rise to trans-
fers of both resources and decision-making powers (Stoker, 2000). Some countries, such as
India and Bolivia, have even passed national legislation mandating popular participation in
local governance, including planning and budgeting.
Problematizing Participation
Participatory governance practices involve intermediary spaces that readjust the bound-
aries between the state and its citizens, establishing new places in which the participants from
both can engage each other in new ways (Cornwall, 2002). These spaces are sometimes for
radical self-help activities outside of the state, but they can also have significant effects on
reconfiguring the scope of formal governance institutions. Indeed, some of these new delib-
erative institutions seek to colonize state power by transforming the interfaces between local
citizens and higher levels of government.
The picture, though, has not been all positive. The experiences have ranged across the
spectrum from very impressive to disastrous, which in turn has politicized the issue. Many
simply call for more participation, whereas others argue for less, often based on little more
than ideological positions. This has led to various efforts to sort out the positive and negative
elements contributing to such participatory projects. Toward this end, Cornwall and Jewkes
(1995) suggest the need to problematize participation to learn what is good and what is bad,
what works and what does not.
Although we still have much to learn about participation, what we do know offers justifi-
cation for optimism, although only cautious optimism. Despite much of the rhetoric sur-
rounding the discussion of participation, experiences with new forms of participatory gover-
nance show participation to be neither straightforward nor easy. A closer look shows that
citizens can participate but that participation has to be carefully organized and facilitated,
even cultivated and nurtured.

Facilitating participatory deliberation raises, to be sure, the question of criteria: What con-
stitutes successful participation? How do we measure or judge it? Certain procedural charac-
teristics related to the question are fairly clear. We can ask about the degree to which the dis-
cussion relationship (i.e., a relationship for talking and listening, asking and answering
questions, suggesting and accepting courses of action) is governed by clear and fixed rules.
Are the rules governing who gets to speak fair and equally distributed? Is the discussion
open? Is the deliberative agenda transparent to all participants, or are particular elements hid-
den and secretive? To what degree are all of the participants represented? Here also arises the
question as to whether or not there is a difference between how the participants might be rep-
resented and how they think they are represented. These questions depend in significant part
on the equality of the power relations in the deliberative setting.
Participation can also be judged in terms of three effects: instrumental, developmental,
and intrinsic. Instrumental effects refer to participation designed to achieve particular goals
or outcomes. People are seen to participate to achieve things that they cannot get through pri-
vate efforts. Developmental effects refer to effects that participation can have on human
development such as expanding the individual’s or group’s powers of education and thought,
feeling and commitment, or social action. People learn from experience how the social sys-
tem and surrounding environments works, come to understand diversity and tolerance, and
gain political skills that help them efficaciously contribute to social change. Intrinsic skills
can be understood as the internal benefits of participation. Whereas developmental effects
pertain to specific action-oriented skills, intrinsic benefits refer to the less tangible internal
effects that result from participation such as a sense of personal gratification, heightened self-
worth, and a stronger identification with one’s community (Nagel, 1987).
Given the difficulties involved in designing and managing participatory processes, it
comes as no surprise to learn that citizen participation schemes rarely follow smooth path-
ways. Local people may themselves be highly skeptical about the worth of investing their
time and energy in participatory activities. In some situations, participation will lack imme-
diate relevance; it may carry more significance for outsiders than it does for those in the rele-
vant communities. Moreover, not everyone within the communities will be able or motivated
to participate. Even when there is sufficient interest in participation, there may be time barri-
ers. And so on. The point is this: Without concern for both the viability and quality of partici-
pation, it is better to forgo the effort. Citizen participation, in short, is a complicated and
uncertain business that needs to be carefully thought out in advance (Fischer, 2000).
Because of the successes of such participatory approaches, a growing number of institu-
tions have successfully co-opted them for other ends. The World Bank (1994), for example,
has instrumentalized participation to generate support for its own agendas. In response to the
demonstrated successes, the World Bank set up a participation program in the 1990s. Having
learned the relevance of local involvement and participation from many of its third world
investment failures, the World Bank has taken an interest in the advantages offered by direct
local contact with the communities it seeks to assist. Not only are senior bank staff members
directed to get to know a particular region through a week of total immersion in one of its vil-
lages or slums, the bank has also pioneered a technique called participatory poverty assess-
ment designed “to enable the poor people to express their realities themselves” (Chambers,
1997, p. xvi). It has been adapted from participatory research experiences in more than 30
countries around the world (Norton & Stephens, 1995).

To use Foucault’s (1986, 1991) terminology, such instrumentalization of participation can

be seen as a “political technology” used to manage and control projects and processes,
bounding the possibilities of popular engagement and disciplining participants. Bourdieu
(1977) refers to these as “officializing strategies” that domesticate participation and detract
attention away from other forms of political action. Given the widespread manipulation of
participatory techniques, Cooke and Kothari (2001) are led to describe participation as “the
new ideology.”
Empowered Deliberative Democracy

Much of the discussion in sociology and political science over participation and civil soci-
ety has been—and remains—theoretical in nature. But there are practical lessons from these
concrete experiences (Rip & Pierre-Benoit, 2004; Skelcher, 2003). An important and much
discussed attempt to sort out these experiences is the work of Fung and Wright (2001, 2003).
They have examined a range of cases designed to promote active political involvement of the
citizenry and have labored to sort out what works. Acknowledging that complexity makes it
difficult for anyone to participate in policy decision making, they speculate that the problem
has more to do with the design of institutions than with the assignments they take on. Toward
this end, they have explored a range of empirical responses to this challenge that constitute
real-world experiences in the redesign of democratic institutions, innovations that elicit the
energy and influence of ordinary people and often draw from the lowest strata of society in
the solution of problems that plague them. In particular, they focus on five such experiments:
neighborhood councils in Chicago that have substantial power over public schools and
neighborhood policing; a regional job training partnership in Wisconsin that brings together
a number of organizations in an effort to provide training that helps workers turn jobs into
meaningful careers; a habitat conservation planning project under the U.S. Endangered Spe-
cies Act that convenes stakeholders to empower them to develop ecosystem governance
arrangements; the participatory budgeting process of Porto Alegre, Brazil, that enables citi-
zens to participate directly in determining the city budget; and local participation reforms
basic to the planning process in Kerala and West Bengal, India.
Even though these reforms vary in their organizational designs, policy issues, and scope of
activities, as Fung and Wright (2001, 2003) note, they all seek to deepen the abilities of ordi-
nary citizens to effectively participate in the shaping of programs and policies relevant to
their own lives. From their common features, they isolate a set of characteristics that they
define as “empowered deliberative democracy.” The principles they draw from these cases
are designed to enable the progressive “colonization of the state” and its agencies. Relying
on the participatory capacities of empowered citizens to engage in reason-based, action-
oriented decision making, the strategy and its principles are offered as a radical political step
toward a more democratic society.
As a product of this work, they isolate three political principles, their design characteris-
tics, and one primary background condition. The background enabling condition states that
there should be rough equality of power among the participants. The political principles
include that (a) the need of such experiments is to address a particular practical problem, (b)
the deliberation relies on the empowered involvement of ordinary citizens and the relevant,
and (c) each experiment employs reasoned deliberation in the effort to solve the problems

under consideration. The institutional design characteristics specify that (a) the devolution of
decision making and the powers of implementation power is to local action-oriented units;
(b) these local units be connected to one another and to the appropriate levels of state respon-
sible for supervision, resource allocation, innovation, and problem solving; and (3) the
experiments “colonize and transform” state institutions in ways that lead to the restructuring
of the administrative agencies responsible for dealing with these problems. The political
power of these local units to implement the programmatic results of their discussions will
thus come from state authorization itself.
Fung and Wright (2001, 2003) contrast these procedural features of empowered delibera-
tive democracy with the more fleeting democratic experiences of elections or social move-
ments that mobilize citizens for a particular purpose and then fade away. The goal, as they
spell it out, is to learn how to create spaces in which citizens can meaningfully engage in
shaping decisions together with state actors through durable forms of practice that advance
more responsive governance. Although such procedural principles are commendable in
themselves, they also have to be judged by their consequences, in particular their contribu-
tions to the effectiveness of state action, social equity, and sustained participation. Toward
this end, Fung and Wright set out an empirical agenda for further testing and refining the
principles of deliberative design. The remainder of this article is an effort to help contribute to
that research agenda by examining more specifically one of their cases—participatory gover-
nance in Kerala. Seeking to further the advancement of such deliberative empowerment, it
illustrates the ways such structures depend on political-cultural preconditions.
The Culture of Deliberative Space:

Social Meaning and Identity Politics
The approach here is not to deny the importance of Fung and Wright’s (2001, 2003) contri-
bution to the discussion of participatory governance but rather to argue for the need to supple-
ment the structural and procedural design principles with an examination of the underlying
social and cultural realities in the political contexts to which they are applied. In addition to
the institutional rules, regulations, and policies within a given territory or space, we need to
understand the sociocultural practices that give meaning to these spaces for the social actors
in them. Although it is important to analyze the material and procedural factors that enable
participation, it should not be done at the expense of the underlying social conditions that are
inherently necessary for participatory governance to work. Deeper political and subjective
factors related to the intersubjective aspects of participation have to be included. As the very
different literatures of both postmodernism and participatory research show, the kinds of
design structures and procedures suggested by Fung and Wright can offer an opening for par-
ticipatory empowerment, but they cannot ensure such participation itself. These literatures,
through their emphasis on social movements, identity struggles and the politics of resistance
and show successful empowerment to be determined by the kinds of intersubjective under-
standings and normative politics that take place within the space. Here we discover what
might be called the “microcultural politics of social space.” This is in large part an
intersubjective politics of meaning driven in significant part by a politics of social identity.
The connection among political governance, identity, and space is introduced to main-
stream political science by March and Olsen (1995). In their view, political governance “is
organized through the interdependent obligations of political identities” (p. 6). The gover-

nance of political space, whether large or small, is about “affecting the frameworks within
which citizens and officials act and politics occurs, and which shape the identities and institu-
tions of civil society” (p. 6). But even more important for the present discussion is the empha-
sis of identity and space in the literatures on social movements and NGOs. In these discus-
sions, the civil society, defined as the space between government and citizens, is typically the
focus of discussion. It denotes “the sphere of private institutions, organizations, associations,
and individuals protected by, but outside the scope of state interventions” (Nash, 2000, p.
273). Much of the analysis concentrates on efforts to create spaces, make room for different
voices to be heard, and enable people to occupy spaces that were previously denied to them.
But it is in the more explicitly postmodern literature that we find the most fully developed
understanding of identity politics and the creation of social space. From this view, an under-
standing of the dynamics of the participation requires a more qualitative and subjective con-
ceptualization of space. Political space, from this perspective, is not just filled up with
competing interests but rather is understood as something that is created, opened, and shaped
by social understandings.
The postmodern literature more fully shifts the understanding of politics to culture, social
meaning, and identity politics. Where standard political analysis focuses on the structures,
practices, and methods of state institutions that organize the play of power, postmodern cul-
tural politics more fundamentally emphasizes the discursive construction of the meanings
and identities of the actors, institutions, and practices inherent to it (Jordon & Weedon,
1995). Through an analysis of discursive practices, it focuses, for example, on how particular
discourses and narratives make some things important and others insignificant, how they
include some participants and exclude or marginalize others. Thus, where traditional politi-
cal analysis separates politics and culture, cultural politics denies the separation. Cultural
politics, as such, examines the signifying practices through which identities, social relations,
and rules are contested, subverted, and possibly transformed. It maintains that these strug-
gles, although less visible and often latent, are primary concerns underlying and shaping the
other more visible and manifest topics and issues under discussion.
Basic here is the interplay of power and difference in the making of social spaces and the
microcultural politics of the interactions within them. In this view, space is essential to the
exercise of power (Bourdieu, 1977; Foucault, 1986; Lefebvre, 1991). Never socially neutral,
space enables some actions—including the possibility of new actions—and blocks or con-
strains others. This perspective thus calls attention to the importance of analyzing the under-
lying and implicit assumptions about social and political relations that organize and consti-
1
tute spaces for participation. To speak only of structural arrangements, such as centralization
and decentralization, neglects the very different kinds of understanding that can configure
2
the construction of a decentered space.
More specifically, the meanings that constitute a space are carried and conveyed through
discourses; through the production and replication of power relations within institutional
3
spaces, they serve as means for domination and control. By formally or informally specify-
ing whose knowledge and meanings count, the discourses in a particular space enable or hin-
der what is said and how it is understood in a particular space (Foucault, 1986; Fraser, 1989).
For example, the way participation is used and understood in a particular discourse deter-
mines what “subject positions” are available for participants to take up within particular
spaces, thus bounding the possibilities for both inclusion and agency. Whether they are con-
structed as citizens, beneficiaries, clients, or users influences what people are perceived to be

entitled to know and to decide or contribute as well as the perceived obligations of those who
seek to involve them. Moreover, the kinds of narratives, artifacts, analyses, and action plans
emerging out of these spaces may tell, and indeed be made to tell, very different stories.
A good deal of the literature on creating spaces is focused on relocating the poor within the
prevailing order and elucidating the ways in which socially imposed identities can be
resisted. The location of the socially marginal is taken, as such, to be a site for radical possi-
bilities; it is a space of resistance. Haraway (1991) speaks of the “marginal perspective” and
local knowledge as sources of insight. Spaces that repress or marginalize people become
transformed into spaces in which they recognize, assert, and expand their own identities.
Social space, then, can be understood as woven together by a set of discursive relation-
ships that determine the meanings and understandings of the identities within them. Through
these discursive practices, the power relations of the surrounding societal context are brought
into the social space. Toward this end, it is necessary to make explicate the less visible discur-
sive power relations that permeate and produce these and other spaces. The first and most
obvious question in the assessment of participatory initiatives is to ask who determines the
form of participation that takes place in a given space—who initiates, chooses the methods,
and takes part. But the second and more difficult question concerns what the people who
enter these spaces bring with them. What are their thoughts and beliefs about what is really
going on in the space and how they strategically orient themselves to these understandings?
Beyond official statements of intentions to participate, what do the people want to gain, what
are their expectations, and how do they perceive the costs and benefits associated with the
activity? Here one needs something akin to the situational logic of phenomenology. The
deliberative situation itself has to be entered to uncover these real but unspoken meanings
shaped by larger political relations (class, race, and gender relations, among others) in
society (Scott, 1986, 1990).
This sociocultural perspective on the politics of participatory deliberation demonstrates
that a formal theory of design for participation is not possible. It does this by making clear
that the structures themselves are social relationships interpreted by those within the spaces;
rather than something like the walls of a room, they are constructed around normative under-
standings about meanings, intentions, and relationships. For this reason, the principles of
design can take on different meanings in different places. Evidence for this normative under-
standing of space, in fact, is found in specific cases in the literature, including those offered
by Fung and Wright (2001, 2003). Toward this end, the discussion turns to an illustrative
examination of the deliberative project in Kerala, drawing on field interviews conducted
there by the author in 1999 (Fischer, 2000).
The People’s Campaign in Kerala:

Decentralization and Political Empowerment
Located on the southwestern coast of India, Kerala has a state government that since the
middle to late 1970s has pursued social and redistributive policies that have impressed many
students of development (Franke, 1993; Heller, 1999). As a consequence, its citizens enjoy a
level of social development that can be favorably compared with many more developed, mid-
dle-income countries. It also has one of the highest rates of literacy among all of the states of
India. To extend and deepen its reform measures, the leadership of the ruling coalition party,
the Left Democratic Front (LDF), turned in 1996 to the formation and institutionalization of

a decentralized system of development planning. Kerala is recognized as representing an

important innovation in participatory governance and is offered by writers such as Fung and
Wright (2001, 2003) as a model of deliberative empowerment.
Although Kerala’s redistribution efforts have been widely celebrated, there is far less
accessible literature on its decentralized development planning. Briefly explained, the story
begins with India’s efforts to reform its overly centralized political system. In 1996, the
newly elected LDF initiated a People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning to empower the
local panchayats (roughly equivalent to a rural county in the United States) and municipal
bodies to draw up the Ninth Five-Year Plan to be submitted to the planners in New Delhi
(Isaac, 2000). A primary reason that the LDF shifted its focus to governance was the opportu-
nity that it offered to deal with the failure of long-term efforts on the part of the central and
state governments of India to make good on an earlier federal constitutional amendment
requiring decentralized planning (Thakur, 1995). Since the 1950s, India regularly engaged in
a 5-year planning process based initially on the Soviet model borrowed by Nehru. Much like
the experience elsewhere, however, centralized planning proved a disappointment. In
response, the central government passed a number of constitutional amendments designed to
facilitate the devolution of the governing process to the local level, but there were few serious
efforts at the state level to decentralize the process, and planning activities remained highly
centralized and bureaucratic.
There were numerous reasons for the failures of decentralization. Among them was the
absence of popular representative administrative structures below the state level. Local insti-
tutions, moreover, were seldom given the power or financial resources to enable serious
development interventions. New Delhi also contributed to the failure by refusing to devolve
more powers to the states while continuing to thrust on them one new centrally sponsored
program after another. These failures gave rise to a national study commission on decentral-
ized governance, which led a debate throughout India, followed by several constitutional
amendments that officially empowered the local level with a mandated role in the planning
process. Nonetheless, the general experience following these provisions was not encourag-
ing. In many cases, the mandates were simply ignored by the local political officials, espe-
cially those supported by powerful and often exploitative landowners, many of whom bene-
fited both financially and politically from denying their peasant workers a voice in local
affairs. In other instances, the machinery and resources to make meaningful decentralized
governance possible still did not exist at the local level.
Beyond the impetus of the legal mandates, the political motivations behind the LDF’s
4
efforts are also critical to understanding its successes. The LDF had already achieved a great
deal of political support for its redistributional programs during its governance of the state.
Indeed, these efforts achieved widespread notoriety and acclaim throughout India and inter-
nationally among development experts and progressive activists (Franke, 1993). From a stra-
tegic point of view, the LDF now reasoned that future gains from redistributional programs
would be comparatively small given their past successes. Its leaders thus decided that decen-
tralization could be a winning political strategy for extending its future political support. The
strategy was especially attractive given the constitutional amendments. Formally seen, the
LDF was only taking seriously the implementation of constitutional mandates long neglected
by local authorities around the country. But, in the process, it could decentralize power in a
way that could channel the resources of newly empowered citizens into further action for
economic and social development. As a result of this structural reform, citizen action would

not only have new long-term benefits for the communities in a range of areas, it would in the
process strengthen the coalition’s political base. In terms of instrumental benefits, the idea
offered just about everything a political party could be looking for. At the same time, it
offered local citizens the developmental and intrinsic benefits of empowerment through
participation.
The People’s Campaign, as the primary effort to implement this decentralization of power,
focused formally on engaging citizen participation in the development of the state’s Five-
Year Plan, later to be sent to New Delhi as part of India’s overall planning process. As a first
step, the State Planning Commission made an unprecedented announcement that 35% to
40% of the planning activities for the Five-Year Plan would be formulated and implemented
from below and allocated to the local level an equivalent share of the planning resources. To
carry this out, the LDF drew on an extensive network of voluntary organizations and social
movements in Kerala, often considered unique to the culture of Kerala. The goal of these
organizations was to make people aware of the People’s Campaign and to motivate them to
participate. It then brought citizens together with local representatives, officials in the various
line departments, and governmental and nongovernmental experts relevant to the local plan-
ning process. The officials of the government departments, along with relevant professionals,
were instructed to decentralize their planning responsibilities and to cooperate in a new dem-
ocratic project. Along with the citizen groups, they were offered extensive training programs
designed to forge cooperative working relationships for the planning assignments. In the pro-
cess, public administrators, civic groups, and local representatives, many of whom had here-
tofore been little more that the passive objects of development planning, were mobilized to
work to improve the daily lives of the average citizens of Kerala.
To carry out the planning itself, the state organized a hierarchy of deliberations that moved
from the local wards (grama sabhas) of the panchayats upward to the district level and then to
the State Planning Board (Issac & Heller, 2003). In and of itself, this was an impressive
achievement. Few people, whether they agree with the campaign or not, deny the significance
of the popular assemblies. As argued below, however, the realization of this process was
much more than a matter of calling on the citizens. It involved as well active efforts to create
the political and social context that made the assemblies work.
To create a political environment conducive to the process, civic organizations were
enlisted to assist in mobilizing their members through publicity strategies, and a social move-
ment introduced empowerment-oriented “conscientization programs” based on the work of
the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1970, 1973). The goal of these empowerment
programs was to employ such didactic techniques to heighten the political consciousness of
local community members, in particular by assisting them in understanding and interpreting
their place in the social and political structures of Kerala and in developing action-oriented
initiatives in their own communities. In the local areas of Kerala, this meant, among other
things, understanding the forces that had been denying them a voice more generally and
hindering the mandates for decentralization more specifically.
At the outset, a range of electronic and print media, including a supported media center
that initiated specific programs, were called on to help stimulate citizen involvement. Draw-
ing on approaches developed in an earlier and highly successful campaign for total literacy,
they held dances and local festivals sensitive to the local cultural milieu to interest and
encourage citizens to take part, and a range of other audiovisual cultural approaches based on
folk arts were employed. They also used participatory street theater based on dramatic tech-

niques for political enlightenment and agitation developed by Bertolt Brecht (1965) to
5
advance the socialist movement in Weimar, Germany, of the 1920s and 1930s. Passersby
would witness the acting out of scenes in which local landowners were exploiting the local
peasants, with the peasant farmers rising up to take control over their own situation (Fischer,
2000).
Other practical steps to maximize participation were taken as well. The popular assem-
blies were scheduled to take place on work holidays, and squads of local volunteers visited
each household to explain the program and urge their participation at the assemblies. The
goal was to encourage at least one member of each household to attend the meetings. The
actual process, which can only be briefly summarized here, commenced with the formation
of various groups to deal with specific issues such as agriculture, schools, and environment.
Present in each group were trained resource persons who served as discussion facilitators
to guide the deliberations. Information about the local area and its people was gathered,
including the relevant local knowledge, and specific development problems were identified.
The citizens were then assisted in analyzing these problems on the basis of their own social
experiences, knowledge, and understandings and in making suggestions for solutions. The
deliberations of each group were combined and summarized in report form for the plenary
session of the local convention. The meetings concluded with the selection of representatives
to take these local plans and proposals to the deliberations of the development seminar,
which constituted the next higher stage. The task of the resources development seminar was
to come up with integrating solutions at the district level for the various problems identified at
the lower-level conventions. The district plans then constituted the bases for discussions
about the overall state plan (Isaac & Heller, 2003, pp. 77-110). After the plan was adopted,
the state then allocated its resources to the local levels for the purposes of carrying out its
implementation.
The People’s Campaign, to be sure, has faced criticism. Conservative political parties have
criticized or challenged it in two ways. They portrayed the campaign as a strategy on the part
of the LDF to politically inculcate members of the local communities. But interviews and
local journalistic accounts offered little concrete evidence that the citizens were being politi-
cally manipulated. The People’s Campaign materials were free of explicit party propaganda
per se; they overtly emphasized giving local citizens a voice through the processes of empow-
erment. Party leaders and social activists appeared quite aware of the dangers involved in
using the program as party propaganda and cautioned against such practices. Moreover,
members of the opposition showed little interest in the details of how the deliberative forums
operated. The main objective was to denounce the LDF efforts on the grounds that they were
the activities of a communist party, typically presented as a problem for a state that needed to
attract new industries. There was also inevitable concern about the popularity of the program
with the majority of the local citizens, particularly the poor. But here as well this did not seem
well beyond the acceptable boundaries of normal party politics. Although there was no doubt
that the LDF was attempting to garner political support, which is what a political party does,
the LDF easily countered the opposition by charging it with representing the voice of the
landowners who had long subjugated local citizens, an argument with considerable political
resonance. Toward this end, the campaign could be legitimated as an effort to implement
federal law long neglected or ignored by landholders and their political spokespersons.
The second criticism pertained to corruption in the administration of the projects resulting
from the local plans. Although this analysis focuses on the participatory assemblies rather

than the implementation of their outcomes, it is worth noting that charges of nepotism in
choosing contractors and suppliers to implement the resulting programs were born out by
investigations, including that of the State Planning Board itself. These misappropriations of
authority and funds were judged mainly to result from inexperience and expediency. It
should be noted that such abuses were not the case in all areas and, where typical, led to
efforts from the top to introduce more democratic accountability, resulting in significant
improvements in subsequent years. Moreover, the malpractices did not compare with the
kinds of widespread corruption that had characterized local administration before the
campaign (Isaac & Heller, 2003, pp. 103-104).
On the question of deliberative participation, the focus of concern here, the campaign by
all counts offered ordinary citizens the opportunity to participate in the development of the
local plans. The more than half a decade of experience with these popular forums has shown
that they play a meaningful role in the governance process. Furthermore, one of the widely
acknowledged successes has been the increased participation of women. Although there has
been unevenness at times and places in both the representative character and the quality of the
participation, something to be anticipated in such an experiment, the success at institutional-
izing these assemblies has established “these popular assemblies . . . as an essential feature of
Kerala’s political landscape” (Isaac & Heller, 2003, p. 103). They are widely judged to repre-
sent “a dramatic advance over the pre-Campaign period” with local government in Kerala
playing “a far greater role in development than anywhere else in India” (p. 107).
The remainder of the article turns to the explanation of the success of these popular assem-
blies and argues for a closer understanding of the essential role of the intervening social
movement, the People’s Science Movement of Kerala (widely known as KSSP, short for
Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parisha). The activities of KSSP were central to the animation of the
decentralized structures. Although KSSP’s involvement in this story does not go unrecog-
nized, the unique nature of its activities needs to be drawn out more specifically to fully grasp
their significance for the process. Geared to the developmental and intrinsic benefits of
empowerment, the main contribution of the KSSP was to establish the local political-cultural
ownership of these deliberative spaces.
KSSP: Critical Pedagogy, Deliberative Space,

and Participatory Inquiry
KSSP is a genuinely unique sociocultural movement. Established in 1962, it was the prod-
uct of a number of scientists and social activists in Kerala who were concerned that scientific
information was basically inaccessible to the majority of the people of the state. After a
decade of success in translating scientific books and articles into the local language and mak-
ing them available to schools and citizens, the movement adopted the motto “Science for
Revolution” and opened the door to what was to become a mass movement with some 60,000
members. In the process, the emphasis of KSSP shifted to more active efforts to generate a
scientific questioning attitude in the population as a whole, the underlying goal of which was
self-empowerment and change. As result, interest and involvement jumped, reflected in two
other major efforts that drew national attention. One was the movement’s opposition to the
building of a proposed hydroelectric dam, which Indira Gandhi was later compelled to can-
cel, and the second was a literacy campaign in the city of Cochin that employed progressive
educational techniques to dramatically increase the literacy rate in the area. In these educa-

tional efforts, both in Cochin and other parts of Kerala, people were taught to read through
materials and methods that promoted a questioning attitude about their own social positions
in the society, the forces that shaped their circumstances, and what might be done about it.
Such methods, as developed by the practitioners of critical pedagogy, transformed an other-
wise abstract or rote activity of learning to read into a project that poignantly took on relevant
everyday meanings in the lives of the students, adult learners in particular.
Given the impressive nature of these educational achievements, KSSP received wide-
spread attention in both India and abroad. The movement was, for example, awarded the
Alternative Noble Prize in 1996 by the Swedish foundation that has bestowed the prize for
some years. The active role of KSSP was thus much more than another component in a com-
plicated story explaining the success of the People’s Campaign. Both its skills and reputation
were central factors in generating public commitment and participation.
The KSSP’s early involvement in the People’s Campaign is easy to explain. Beyond its
reputation generally, many members of the LDF and the State Planning Board were also
members of KSSP. Turning to KSSP for assistance was for them an obvious move. To fully
grasp KSSP’s activities, however, requires an understanding of the philosophy behind them.
Basic here are the educational philosophy and pedagogical approach of Paulo Freire (1970)
and the methods of participatory research that have been motivated by them (Chambers,
1997). Working with people who have never participated—people who typically begin with
the belief that they do not have the capacities to contribute to a deliberative process—the
main contribution of the approach was to make clear a basic message: These forums were for
the people on their own terms.
Such pedagogical praxis, emphasizing the developmental and intrinsic benefits of partici-
pation, begins by drawing out the relevant community histories and local knowledge. By
problematizing the social marginality of the community members, particularly peasant farm-
ers, these narrative stories are then used to assist them in examining their own beliefs and
identities in ways that help them reflect on established understandings of the existing social-
structural relationships (Fischer, 2000). In the process of learning and discussing the symbols
and artifacts through which the social order is communicated, experienced, reproduced, and
explored, they are assisted in exploring the cultural politics that defines and solidifies their
own subject positions in the dominant discourses of those who exercise social and political
6
power. Through the construction of alternative understandings, the participants fashion net-
works of solidarity and build confidence in their own knowledge and capabilities and in the
process develop a sense of their own abilities to address their interests and needs. These new
understandings and senses of agency shape the assumptions that socially valorize the deliber-
ative space. In Kerala, as we see in the next section, the specific vehicle for engaging these
issues was the deliberative inquiry designed for the decentralized planning.
Although critical pedagogy and participatory research come from different intellectual
traditions than does postmodernism, both methods pursue many of the same kinds of issues
associated with social space, political identity, social meaning, marginality, and resistance.
These concepts are basic to the frameworks that both methods employ in their efforts to
design environments for social learning. Although not postmodernist per se, participatory
research can easily be described as a closely related practice for postpositivist inquiry.
To facilitate the kind of openness and authenticity required for such deliberation, emphasis
is placed on restructuring the professional-teacher-participant-learner relationship to mini-
mize the social, emotional, and intellectual distance that typically separates professionals

7
from the participants’ experiential life world. Stressing the unique demands placed on those
who seek to initiate such an egalitarian—even radically egalitarian—participatory process,
the practitioners of such participatory inquiry work to deal with the potential problems of
intellectual elitism that can undermine such projects. As one of the leading theorists of partic-
ipatory research puts it, insofar as “movements for social change are normally led by intellec-
tuals who are in a position to provide leadership not because of any particular aptitude but
because they are privileged by their economic and social status,” there are
many dangers of relying on an elite leadership for social transformation: the dangers of inflated
egos, the fragility of the commitment in the face of attractive temptations; the problems of the
growth in size of the elite class as a movement grows and the danger of attracting new adherents
holding altogether different commitments (Rahman, 1993, p. 84)
as well as the self-perpetuating nature of institutions established to supply such leadership.

These were just the kinds of considerations that KSSP leaders insisted on keeping at the fore-
front of the efforts.
KSSP: Integrating Expert and Local Knowledges

After the campaign’s decentralized participatory structures were developed, the project
confronted a more specific question: What would be the basis of the discussions in the decen-
tralized deliberations? Much of the information needed to assess the physical and social char-
acteristics of the local areas was unavailable. To deal with this, KSSP combined the methods
of critical pedagogy with techniques of rural resource mapping to develop a more specific
practice for gathering the information needed for the deliberations. The bridge across these
two activities—pedagogy and resource mapping—was the community members’ local
knowledge of their panchayats, social and physical. It became a vehicle for both the data col-
lection and the cultural valorization of the political context that enlivened the deliberations of
the popular assemblies.
More specifically, the KSSP labored to integrate an established method of evaluating
local development that offered quick but reasonably accurate assessments of rural
resources—participatory rural appraisal (or transect walks)—with more rigorous scientific
approaches and participatory pedagogical practices. Those concerned with the didactic
methods worked this out with the help of the movement’s own members at the Center for
Earth Science Studies (CESS) in Trivandrum, an institution long engaged in rigorous scien-
tific research related to resource management and planning. The result was a innovative pro-
cedure that combined community-based mapping techniques with the more rigorous scien-
tific mapping techniques practiced by the environmental and resource planners of the CESS
and that combined the local knowledge and social understandings that made the data collec-
tion and planning processes relevant to the everyday life of community members (Fischer,
2000). Reflecting the pedagogical practices, the goal was described as land literacy.
Approaching the mapping process as a sociocultural tool for communication among plan-
ning experts and local community members, the KSSP and CESS sought to answer three
basic local questions: What were the economic, environmental, and social resources in the
areas? Where were they located? And how were they located? In economic and environmen-
tal terms, these concerns were built around questions pertaining to the terrain of the land,

water resources, and the uses of both. With regard to land, the planners sought information on
the specific forms of the terrain. For example, does it slope? What types of soil does it have?
In terms of water, they focused on characteristics such as streams or ponds, whereas land use
raised questions concerned with the type of crops planted and how much land is under culti-
vation. All were questions for which accurate information was unavailable. The absence of
this information made it difficult to systematically think about development planning.
To this end, the staff developed a base map from information gathered from local revenue
maps and official documents about landholdings in each village. To these physical questions,
the CESS staff overlaid the questions about the local infrastructure. That is, what had already
taken place in the area? Were there roads, schools, and other community facilities, and if so,
where precisely were they located? Once the basic design of the planning process was in
place, CESS planners turned back to the KSSP, which then took over the assignment of iden-
tifying community volunteers for the project and developing and offering a training program
for local data collection.
The approach to data collection was designed to bring the local citizens themselves into
the research process and, through their activities, to initiate and animate more general contact
and discussion about the community among its members themselves. Toward this end, KSSP
identified a team of five to eight volunteers for each village in a particular district. In selecting
the local volunteers, it was decided that formal educational background needed not be a deci-
sive requirement for participation. For example, the questions about physical terrain could be
formulated in ways that permitted the local characteristics to be identified through a scheme
of color coding. After the training, the volunteers were sent to the village wards to be
mapped. Each group chose a leader and a ward office (usually someone’s home) and estab-
lished a schedule or work plan for the actual mapping. In addition to the physical informa-
tion, the volunteers and other villagers assembled relevant social data such as numbers of
people in households, earnings, and employment. Throughout the collection of both the
physical and social data, the questions were presented in local rather than scientific terminol-
ogy. They were formulated in ways that helped people understand in their own lay languages
the findings and their economic and social implications.
On completion of the physical and social mapping by the volunteers, CESS planners
returned to include other parameters less visible to the naked eye that required expert mea-
surement (e.g., the location of underground water sources). The results were seven sets of
maps that integrated the physical and social data, five of which were constructed by the vol-
unteers, two by the planners. The analytic task was to overlay these maps. Onto the physical
land use maps were added relevant survey information about primary production and second-
ary social sectors. At the end of the process, the approach to data collection had not only
brought the local citizens themselves into the research process, it served to initiate and ani-
mate discussions about the community. The result of these efforts was a development report
that became the basis for community deliberations aimed at formulating an action plan that in
turn served as a component of the larger planning process.
Up to 100 pages in length, the development reports offered detailed pictures of local devel-
opment. Their dozen chapters combined a discussion of local social and cultural history with
assessments of various resources such as agriculture, education, health, energy, and water
supply. An emphasis on the importance of social mobilization for community change was
combined with a presentation of problems and an action plan. The action plans specifically
emphasized three questions: What were the economic and social problems? What were the

future prospects? And what were the gaps between the two? In the context of social and polit-
ical understandings worked out by the communities, these issues were then discussed in the
decentralized deliberative forums. From these deliberations emerged a sense of the barriers
that stood in the path of solving the communities’ problems, strategies that could be devel-
oped to do something about them, and a heightened sense of motivation to deal with these
issues on terms relevant to the communities’ own interests. In short, there were now grounds
for critical discussion, especially mutual discussions among community members, the KSSP
facilitators, and the planning experts.
To inform and assist the local planning efforts, the state planning office made available to
the panchayats information about all of the ongoing development programs in the state, and
the line department offices of the government prepared a review of their respective develop-
ment sector programs already being implemented in the panchayats, emphasizing in particu-
lar those relevant to the development of their local plans. To further facilitate discussion
about formulation of the integrated programs at the level of the development seminars, a
series of manuals on topics such as watershed management, education and schools, sanita-
tion, drinking water, total energy programs, and environmental protection were prepared and
distributed among resource persons. To give the panchayats confidence in their practicality,
care was taken in the manuals to ensure that they were based on actual local field experiences.
Moreover, experts were appointed on a volunteer basis to serve in—but only in—an advisory
capacity during the local deliberations. The deliberative bodies could, if they so desired, avail
themselves of the advice drawn from the full range of sectors such as agriculture, education,
and environment. It is also important to note that expert was defined in a very broad sense; it
not only included the civil engineer, but also the wise farmer.
In an effort to spread the lessons of the project, KSSP developed in later years a guidebook
for use by some 500 or more other local areas in India that have sought to implement the
model or a variant of it. This material emphasizes the need to take the particular local context
into consideration; the Kerala model, it asserts, will not work everywhere. In most cases, it at
least requires local adjustments. Toward this end, the guidelines point out that there can be no
hard and fast blueprints for participatory governance; any serious effort at such reform will
require a good deal of trial and error and learning by doing. Continuing their own experimen-
tation, it should also be added, KSSP has augmented the popular assemblies through the
development of smaller neighborhood groups of 40 or 50 families into mini popular assem-
blies that offer more extensive opportunities to discuss local priorities, issues, and plans than
do the grama sahbas. Designed to add an additional layer of democratic governance, KSSP
has in fact organized a campaign to spread these grassroots groups throughout the state as a
whole.
Conclusions
The discussion has made clear that the decentralized design of the People’s Campaign for
decentralized governance was an important—even unprecedented—political step toward
participatory governance in the state of Kerala. The argument is that although structural
decentralization was a political precondition for the successful implementation of the Peo-
ple’s Campaign in and of itself, the specific decentralized design of the institutions cannot
explain this impressive achievement. Every bit as important was the social valorization of the
deliberative spaces created by decentralization. In addition to the progressive politics of the

ruling coalition, the pedagogically oriented interventions of the KSSP played a critical role in
shaping the popular assemblies.
The LDF coalition, as we saw, advanced the decentralized planning project statewide from
the top down through party meetings, media events, street theater, and folk festivals. In the
process, it emphasized the instrumental benefits of citizen participation, namely, the empow-
erment of citizens to deal themselves with local developmental issues such as environmental
protection, agricultural modernization, education, health care, and so on. Toward this end,
the project was an explicit challenge to powerful landholders and others who had long
ignored the various constitutional amendments mandating citizen participation. The mes-
sage of the campaign conveyed through the media and public events was clear: It was to give a
voice to community members in an effort to wrest away local political control from local
landowners who had long exploited these districts with little or no opposition. The LDF
sought, in short, to redistribute power to community leaders through processes anchored in
state and national law. Given that the LDF had previously helped many of these poor and rela-
tively uneducated peasant farmers through their earlier redistributive efforts, the vast major-
ity of them were enthusiastic political supporters, which was no small consideration in
generating enthusiasm and energy needed to carry out the process.
Equally important, if not more so, the party turned to KSSP, the Kerala social movement
dedicated to bringing literacy and science to the people, to explain the project to local citi-
zens, lay the pedagogical groundwork for the inquiry process, organize the deliberative
assemblies, and train resource facilitators to assist with the deliberations. Indeed the facilita-
tion techniques were informed by Freireian pedagogical techniques for adult education and
participatory action research. Together these efforts established a highly motivated constitu-
ency that could, with the kind of local knowledge gathered through the processes of partici-
patory research, meaningfully deliberate and formulate action plans for their local areas.
The crucial contribution of the KSSP was thus to establish the local political ownership of
these deliberative spaces, introduce innovative methods for participatory data collection, and
develop the deliberative culture. As a result of these activities, the assemblies were infused
with the message that they were for the local participants and to be conducted on their own
terms. The materials that provided the basis for developing this context were local knowledge
and community narratives, examined and reinterpreted in terms of the poor’s position and
identity in the prevailing order and the political and material forces that held them there.
Thus, in the same process of interpreting the local narratives, the formal and informal rules of
communicative interaction were worked out.
What the KSSP understood was that the participatory process had to be organized and cul-
tivated. It could not simply be left to the citizens. In this respect, the Kerala project under-
scored an important finding of participatory inquiry more generally, namely, the need for
someone with expert skills to assist the community in organizing their struggles, to help them
to understand the situation, and to develop alternative strategies (Fischer, 2000). The goal
was to establish autonomous participatory practices in the local communities, but it was rec-
ognized that they would first have to be cultivated before they could be successfully
institutionalized.
To cultivate the empowerment process, KSSP innovatively organized the participatory
mapping process that not only collected local information and knowledge but cognitively
built community members into the activity. The model of participatory resource mapping
offered an impressive procedure for facilitating an interaction between scientific experts and

the local citizens. The development of the overlapping maps can be seen as an important con-
tribution to the practices of both critical pedagogy and participatory research. For the
subpolitics of participatory governance, it showed how the inquiry of the citizens and scien-
tists can be systematically integrated in ways that augment one another and how participatory
research can be built into the larger politics making structure. The Kerala State Planning
Board has demonstrated how such local empowerment efforts, rather than just remaining a
grassroots problem-solving strategy, can meaningfully be connected to higher level delibera-
tive processes in the formation of the state plan. These contributions of People’s Campaign
offer lessons from which participatory governance efforts everywhere can benefit.
For deliberative empowerment, this experience suggests that a participatory project at the
bottom of the political structure needs to have strong political support from above. In the case
of Kerala, the government itself initiated the empowerment project and shaped a political cli-
mate at both the state and local levels conducive to its successful implementation. Although
detailed comparisons are beyond the scope of this article, the same phenomenon can be seen
in the participatory budget project in Porto Alegre, the Brazilian city ruled by a progressive
socialist party that established it (Baiocchi, 2003). It also did this, it should be noted, with the
assistance of didactic methods based on the pedagogical theory and practices of Freire (1970,
1973). If genuine empowerment in the public sector is taken to mean transformative politics,
both political support from above and the facilitation of the local activities appear as essential
ingredients of success.
This is not to say that other grassroots or bottom-up projects would be without effect. But
in the absence of broader support, both political and pedagogical, deliberation will much
more likely, if not necessarily, become another forum for strategic struggle, rather than citi-
zen empowerment per se. Although the principles of deliberative empowerment offered by
Fung and Wright (2001, 2003) are presented as a strategy for colonizing the state, there are
few convincing reasons to believe that deliberation in spaces created by the state would per-
mit—at least not for long—the kinds of transformative or emancipatory discourses charac-
teristic of decentralized deliberation in Kerala. One can easily raise this question about other
8
case studies presented as examples of deliberative empowerment. This empirical question
needs to be added to the research agenda.
Beyond strong support from above, there is also a need for those advancing empowerment
actively to enter the discursive space itself. Even when a local participatory project has politi-
cal support, it cannot be assumed that the citizens will themselves take up the opportunity and
turn it into a forum for political emancipation. It is important to not only recognize that all
parties at the local level will not share the same political interests or social consciousness but
also see that such forums need to be organized pedagogically. Participatory facilitators need
to establish the conditions and procedures that make deliberative empowerment possible.
Toward this end, we need to more thoroughly research the material and cognitive conditions
that make this possible as well as the practices themselves.
Given the absence of political consensus supporting genuine deliberative empowerment in
Western nations, such participatory projects are more likely to continue to evolve in civil
society, supported in particular by social movements such as Science for the People. Given
that the state exists as the product of competing political forces, the preconditions for groups
with common interests and concerns to deliberate meaningfully are more likely to be found
or established in civil society. Although the task will remain difficult, as much of civil society
itself is beset with divisions of class, ethnicity, and race, the relative openness of civil society

offers better chances for citizens to create spaces in which they might engage in nonstrategic
discourse about basic choices involved in how they want to live together, the practices of gov-
ernance needed to advance and support such decisions, and the political strategies that can
help to bring them about. With the exception of the presence of a socially progressive govern-
ment, as in Kerala or Porto Alegre, it is mainly in civil society that social spaces can be shaped
free of the kinds of implicit coercion built into official governance structures. It is a point
clearly recognized in the emancipatory literatures of participatory research, empowerment,
and self-governance. The progressive projects of self-governance reported there are typically
to be found in spaces located outside of the formal state. Removed from the state, the function
is to use pedagogy to facilitate the development of critical perspectives that can serve as the
basis for solidarity and political opposition to particular state policies and practices. Indeed
to think otherwise would seem to neglect the reasons for the emergence of civil society-
oriented social movements and NGOs during the past decades.
From this perspective, then, the pedagogical role in deliberative empowerment becomes a
primary consideration. Although basic preconditions for deliberative empowerment in gov-
ernment depend on broader political developments in society, the pedagogical cultivation of
discursive spaces poses an important task for the social sciences. Toward this end, the peda-
gogical dimension needs to receive more attention on the research agenda of empowered par-
ticipatory governance. Social scientists need to examine more carefully the kinds of
epistemic relationships that govern such deliberation. To move beyond the formal design of
decentralized structures, there is a need to engage in experimentation about the nature of
communication and learning in these settings. It is a task that should be elevated on the
research agenda. A place to begin is the wealth of information from an extensive range of
projects devoted to participatory research and empowerment.
Notes
1. Social relations, in this view, exist only in and through space—having no reality outside the sites in which
they are lived, experienced, and practiced. Attention is drawn to how spaces come to be defined, perceived, and
animated. Particular ways of thinking about society are seen to be played out in the ways that spaces are organized
and occupied and in how they are conceived and perceived. The works of theorists such as Lefebvre (1991) thus
call attention to the importance of analyzing the underlying and implicit assumptions about the social and political
relations that organize and constitute spaces for participation.
2. Especially interesting is the way Lefebvre (1991) shows how the traces of the production of a space are
etched into that space. Or, as Bourdieu (1977) argues, the traces of prior interaction are so ingrained in a social
space and generally unquestioned that they can be understood to be literally embodied in a particular context.
Officialized spaces, to use Bourdieu’s term, such as those created for public consultation or user groups, always
exist alongside unofficial spaces and the spaces of everyday life, just as invited spaces exit alongside those claimed
and shaped by a range of other actors. Indeed, people bring with them into a new space the collections of associa-
tions and experiences they have gained from their encounters in other spaces and employ them to decide what the
new space is about and how they should orient themselves to it.
3. Focusing on the architecture of social space, Foucault (1986, 1991) shows how the discursive replication of
the relations of power within an institutional space is a means of controlling it. To take a simple but familiar illus-
tration, the way in which space in a newly created arena is managed—sitting in rows, for example, with the women
at the back of the room—makes it easier for some people to speak and be heard than others. Similarly, his work
makes clear that the different associations people might have of a particular place will often produce different
dynamics. The participatory event held in a different location can easily produce different effects, as the introduc-
tion of a prayer or an address by a local leader can, for instance, influence the shape of a deliberation. Through such
spatial manipulations, political leaders can subtly reproduce the old rules of the game within spaces, such as politi-

cal committees or public consultations, restricting the engagement of people without status confidence or
familiarity.
4. The discussion of the people’s campaign is based on interviews conducted in 1999 in Trivandrum, Kerala,
India. The interviews included people who were both supportive and critical of the people’s campaign. Especially
helpful were Dr. John Kurien and Dr. K. J. Joseph of the Center for Development Studies in Trivandrum, Kerala;
R. Radhakrishnan, then president of Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parisha (KSSP); N. C. Narayanan, former KSSP activ-
ist; Babu Ambat of the Centre for Environment and Development in Trivandrum; Dr. Ajaykumar Varma of the Sci-
ence, Technology, and Environment Department of the state of Kerala; and T. M. Thomas Isaac, prominent mem-
ber of the Left Democratic Front and the State Planning Board during the campaign and KSSP activist. Through
interviews, related literature, and campaign documents of various sorts, they offered extensive information on
both the politics and practices of the campaign. Thanks also goes to citizens who participated in the deliberative
forums, staff members of the Kerala State Planning Board, and students at the Center for Development Studies, all
of whom generously took time to explain the project as they experienced or perceived it. In addition, several local
journalists made available articles that both praised and criticized the campaign. An earlier discussion of the Peo-
ple’s Campaign focused more specifically on the role of expertise appeared in Fischer (2000).
5. Brecht (1965) did not want the audience to identify or sympathize with the characters on stage, as was the
approach in the classical tradition of theater. Instead the viewers were to think politically and socially and to judge
the actions of the players accordingly. His characters confront both one another and the audience critically. Some
have even described the approach as clinical.
6. In many ways, the process is like opening up the deeper, more difficult kinds of questions that a critical anal-
ysis of power would raise (Lukes, 2005). To what degree do more powerful people shape or influence the con-
sciousness of inequalities of the less powerful and induce them to accept a sense of powerlessness? Although the
speaker in a deliberation is normally expected to respond only to what has been explicitly said, a critical pedagogi-
cal discourse includes questions about who is saying it and why. Is that person in a position to tell them what he or
she tells them? Does he or she have firsthand knowledge and experience of the realities of the situation? Does he or
she actually speak for someone else? That is, it concerns identity questions concerned with, as the phrase goes,
where the speaker is coming from. In the process, it opens the discussion to questions pertaining to the individual’s
or group’s relations to the larger social system—issues including social standing, money, privilege, and the like.
7. Such participatory inquiry, as an enlightenment strategy for raising the consciousness of ordinary citizens
with common interests and concerns, emphasizes the political dimensions of knowledge production, the role of
knowledge as an instrument of power and control, and the politics of the citizen-expert relationships. It takes
human beings to be cocreators of their own reality through the cognitive and emotional experiences—thinking,
imagining, and acting—that they gain through participation (Reason, 1994, p. 324).
8. Fung and Wright (2003), for example, include in their work the case of the Habitat Protection Program set up
by the U.S. Congress and a Wisconsin state industry council for job development. It is doubtful that deliberations
about habitat protection in this setting would seriously entertain the discourses of radical ecology or that an indus-
try council established in conjunction with a state government would be willing to accept talk about transforming
the capitalist labor market. To help people turn jobs into careers in the existing industrial system is scarcely the
kind of transformative discourse that might subversively colonize the state. There is good reason, given the exten-
sive co-optation of participatory reforms, to suspect that the latter cases would be targets for manipulation by the
state in pursuit of its own interests. These cases are thus more likely to be characterized by the kinds of hidden
resistance discussed by Foucault (1986, 1991) or Scott (1986, 1990) than by open empowerment discourses. Such
resistance is by no means unimportant, but the political limits of such a politics have to be understood and
theorized differently.
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Author.
Frank Fischer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, is currently a visiting professor at the Uni-
versity of Kassel, Germany. His most recent books are Citizen, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of
Local Knowledge and Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices. He is currently
working on the role of professional expertise in the theory and practice of deliberative democracy.


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The American Review of Public Administration

Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment: The Cultural Politics of Discursive Space

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American Society for Public Administration

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Participatory Governance as © 2006 Sage Publications

The Cultural Politics of Discursive Space

Keywords: citizen participation; deliberation; culture; social space; decentralized gover-

T he shift from government to governance represents one of the important theoretical

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The Assent of Participation

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expertise. Such experimentation, emphasizing empowerment and self-help strategies, is

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To use Foucault’s (1986, 1991) terminology, such instrumentalization of participation can

Empowered Deliberative Democracy

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The Culture of Deliberative Space:

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The People’s Campaign in Kerala:

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a decentralized system of development planning. Kerala is recognized as representing an

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KSSP: Critical Pedagogy, Deliberative Space,

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as well as the self-perpetuating nature of institutions established to supply such leadership.

KSSP: Integrating Expert and Local Knowledges

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